let the truth out world news, politics and businesshttp://letthetruthout.com
finding the truth in newsMon, 29 Jan 2018 04:29:54 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Michael Hoskins a rip off Nashville lawyerhttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/23/michael-hoskins-rip-off-nashville-lawyer/
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 23:16:36 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29267Lawyers are representative of clients or a neutral third party, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice. There are over twenty seven thousand lawyers in Tennessee where population is about six million and number of families about 2 million. Considering these numbers there are […]

]]>Lawyers are representative of clients or a neutral third party, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.

There are over twenty seven thousand lawyers in Tennessee where population is about six million and number of families about 2 million. Considering these numbers there are not many jobs available for lawyers in Tennessee. It means each lawyer on equal base of distribution should have about 50 to 60 clients a year. But this is based on equal distribution of cases requiring a lawyer which is not the case at all. So, how would a lawyer could survive if not working for a law firm.

Finding a client is hard in such tight market therefore there are lawyers who do not perform well, lack enough knowledge of the law or understanding the court and residing judge.

One of those lawyers is Michael Hoskins a Nashvillian lawyer. A lawyer that loves to join the elites but lacks manners and etiquette, a lawyer that lacks knowledge of law and the courtrooms but is ego reaches farthest planet in our galaxy.

Michale Hoskins is one of those lawyers whose invoices are also extremely padded and charges for the work he has not done or creates work that is not needed or required by the court in defense of his client.

Michael Hoskins is a struggling lawyer but has found a solution that is unethical but he continues to do it. Simply, he is charging the client for what is not needed or exaggerates the number of hours he worked on the case. Michale Hoskins also is one of those lucky lawyers who has found the crystal ball enabling him to see the ruling of judges in advance.

Michael Hoskins is a type of lawyer that would charge you a retainer of 3000 dollars for a simple moving traffic violation. And that is just the beginning.

Michael Hoskins is a type of lawyer that would charge you for the time he did not spend on your case twice and if he could possibly more. For example, he would prepare the case in court and charges you for that and time spent in court plus additional time that he did not spend on the case.

He is a lawyer who lacks code of ethics, and professionalism. If you are looking for a crock you could hire him but make sure you do not give him a blank credit card.

]]>Iran bans English in primary schools after leader’s warninghttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/23/us-agrees-send-lethal-weapons-ukraine-angering-russia/
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 23:05:26 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29265Iran has banned the teaching of English in primary schools, a senior education official has said, after Islamic leaders warned that early learning of the language opened the way to a western “cultural invasion”. “Teaching English in government and non-government primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations,” Mehdi Navid-Adham, head of […]

]]>Iran has banned the teaching of English in primary schools, a senior education official has said, after Islamic leaders warned that early learning of the language opened the way to a western “cultural invasion”.

“Teaching English in government and non-government primary schools in the official curriculum is against laws and regulations,” Mehdi Navid-Adham, head of the state-run high education council, told state television.

“The assumption is that in primary education the groundwork for the Iranian culture of the students is laid,” he said.

The teaching of English usually starts in middle school in Iran, at the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary schools below that age also have English classes.

Some children also attend private language institutes after their school day, while children from more privileged families attending non-government schools receive English tuition.

Iran’s Islamic leaders have often warned about the dangers of a “cultural invasion”, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, voiced outrage in 2016 over the “teaching of the English language spreading to nursery schools”.

Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, said in a speech to teachers: “That does not mean opposition to learning a foreign language, but [this is the] promotion of a foreign culture in the country and among children, young adults and youths.”

While there was no mention of the announcement being linked to more than a week of protests against the clerical establishment and government, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have said that the unrest was also fomented by foreign enemies.

]]>In State of Union, Trump to make case that America is backhttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/23/gop-fights-voters-stop-next-roy-moore/
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 23:02:01 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29263WASHINGTON — Seeking to move past the shadow of the Russia investigation, President Donald Trump intends to use his first State of the Union address to cite economic progress under his watch while pushing for bipartisanship with Democrats on issues such as rebuilding roads and bridges. The White House said Sunday that the president would […]

]]>WASHINGTON — Seeking to move past the shadow of the Russia investigation, President Donald Trump intends to use his first State of the Union address to cite economic progress under his watch while pushing for bipartisanship with Democrats on issues such as rebuilding roads and bridges.

The White House said Sunday that the president would point to a robust economy and low unemployment during his first year and the benefits of a tax overhaul during Tuesday’s address to Congress and the nation. Aides have said Trump, who stayed at the White House over the weekend as he prepared, is expected to set aside his more combative tone for one of compromise and bipartisanship.

“The president is going to talk about how America’s back,” said White House legislative director Marc Short. “The president is also going to make an appeal to Democrats … to say we need to rebuild our country. And to make an appeal that to do infrastructure, we need to do it in a bipartisan way.”

Short said Trump would urge Democrats to support additional military spending in light of “dramatic threats on the global scene.”

White House officials have said the theme of the annual address will be “building a safe, strong and proud America” and that Trump was looking to showcase the accomplishments of his first year while setting the tone for the second.

As Trump looks ahead, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible obstruction of justice and Trump campaign ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 election grinds on.

It often has distracted from the president’s message. For example, Trump’s address to financial and global leaders in Davos, Switzerland, last week followed reports that he ordered a top White House lawyer to fire Mueller last June but backed off when the lawyer threatened to resign. Trump called the report “fake news.”

On the policy front, immigration is an immediate flashpoint for Trump and Congress. In the prime-time speech Tuesday, the president plans to promote his proposal for $25 billion for a wall along the Mexican border and for a path to citizenship for nearly 2 million young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

Trump’s plan includes billions for border security and significant changes to legal immigration long sought by hard-liners within the Republican Party. But some conservatives have warned that the deal would amount to “amnesty” for the young immigrants known as Dreamers, and many Democrats and immigration activists have outright rejected it.

“I think all of us realize that it’s going to take a compromise on this issue for us to get something done and to protect the Dreamer population, which is certainly a goal of mine,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. “But I think the president is also right about border security, that we do need to beef up our border security.”

“Let’s see if it’s something that we can agree on, something we need to adjust, something we can negotiate with,” he said.

Part of Trump’s goal in the speech is to set the course of the debate as Republicans look to retain their majority in Congress. He is expected to say the tax overhaul will unleash economic growth and he will point to companies that have provided their employees with $1,000 bonuses and other benefits.

Trump plans to outline a nearly $2 trillion plan that his administration contends will trigger $1 trillion or more in public and private spending on roads, bridges and other public works projects.

On trade, Trump will note his preference for one-on-one deals instead of multilateral agreements, building on his speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

And he will offer an update on the fight against terrorism and his view of international threats, including North Korea. A senior administration official providing a preview of the speech said Trump probably would avoid the taunts of “Little Rocket Man” for Kim Jong Un and “fire and fury” that he used before. The official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The address comes at a critical point for the president. He is battling poor approval ratings and is trying to move past the government shutdown that coincided with the anniversary of his inauguration. He’s also preparing for a grueling midterm election season that has tripped up other first-term presidents.

Trump was not expected to embark on an extensive sales pitch around the country after the speech. He plans to address a Republican congressional retreat in West Virginia on Thursday. Vice President Mike Pence will attend a tax overhaul event in West Virginia on Wednesday and speak to the GOP congressional retreat later in the day. Pence will hold events in the Pittsburgh area Friday.

Short spoke on “Fox News Sunday” and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Collins spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union,” and Manchin spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

]]>LONDON— Renowned conductor Charles Dutoit on Saturday denied serious accusations of sexual misconduct that have caused major symphonies in Europe, Australia and the United States to suspend relationships with him.

Dutoit’s office issued a statement saying the allegations “have absolutely no basis in truth” and vowed to mount a meaningful defense. The Associated Press reported Thursday that three opera singers and a classical musician had accused him of sexual assault in incidents they say occurred between 1985 and 2010.

His first public response to the allegations was defiant.

“The allegations made against me are as shocking to me as they are to my friends and colleagues. I do not recognize the man or the actions being described in the media,” Dutoit said in a brief statement emailed to the Associated Press.

“Whilst informal physical contact is commonplace in the arts world as a mutual gesture of friendship, the serious accusations made involving coercion and forced physical contact have absolutely no basis in truth. I am taking legal advice and plan to meaningfully defend myself and I believe within this current climate, media accusations on serious physical abuse do not help society tackle these issues properly if the claims are in fact not true.”

The 81-year-old Dutoit is artistic director and principal conductor at the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. The orchestra said Friday it had jointly decided with Dutoit to relieve him of upcoming concert obligations.

The Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Sydney, Boston and San Francisco symphonies announced they were cutting ties with Dutoit, citing the “serious nature of the allegations” detailed by the AP. Meanwhile, orchestras in New York, Chicago and Cleveland quickly released statements saying that Dutoit has withdrawn his services for upcoming concerts. He was scheduled to appear at the New York Philharmonic next month; the other performances were scattered through 2018.

The four women who spoke to AP said Dutoit attacked them on the sidelines of rehearsals and performances with orchestras in five cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Saratoga Springs, New York. All four told the AP they never filed formal complaints at the time but were inspired to speak out now because of the national conversation about sexual misconduct by powerful men.

The women, two who were named in the AP story, said the Swiss-born conductor physically restrained them, forced his body against theirs, sometimes put his tongue in their mouths and, in one case, stuck her hand down his pants.

Dutoit is the second high-profile figure in the classical music world to be accused of sexual misconduct recently. Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Opera suspended conductor James Levine when misconduct accusations surfaced. Levine says the allegations against him are “unfounded.”

]]>‘Merry Christmas’ for Trump is more than a wishhttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/23/merry-christmas-trump-wish/
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 22:53:33 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29259WASHINGTON — There’s no mistaking President Donald Trump’s “Merry Christmas” message — he wields it as a weapon against political correctness. For weeks, he’s been liberally sprinkling his public remarks with Christmas tidings. And then pointing it out in case anyone fails to notice. Trump has long promised that this year would be different after […]

]]>WASHINGTON — There’s no mistaking President Donald Trump’s “Merry Christmas” message — he wields it as a weapon against political correctness.

For weeks, he’s been liberally sprinkling his public remarks with Christmas tidings. And then pointing it out in case anyone fails to notice.

Trump has long promised that this year would be different after what he saw as a trend toward giving the Christian celebration short shrift in favor of a more generic and inclusive “happy holidays” message.

“Well, guess what? We’re saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” Trump announced in October at a Values Voter Summit of conservatives.

For all of that, though, it turns out the 2017 holiday rhythms at the White House are similar to those of years past.

The president participated in the annual lighting of the National Christmas Tree. The house has been decked out for the season with an array of traditional trimmings, including the longstanding crèche in the East Room. There has been a whirlwind of parties — roughly 20 receptions and more than 100 open houses, including a reception to mark Hanukkah.

“It is as beautiful as it has always has been. It is as special as it always has been,” said Anita McBride, who served as first lady Laura Bush’s chief of staff.

The White House holidays under Barack and Michelle Obama also included plenty of Christmas trappings and cheer. Obama offered a more general holiday message on the official greeting card, but wished “Merry Christmas” at the National Tree lighting, on his Twitter account and in his weekly address.

Trump has expressed concern about a diminished “Merry Christmas” message for years. In 2011, he criticized Obama’s approach, saying on Twitter that the president had “issued a statement for Kwanza but failed to issue one for Christmas.” In fact, that year Obama wished people “Merry Christmas” from his Twitter account and gave a video address with his wife in which he wished people a “Merry Christmas and happy holidays.” Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also offered greetings marking Kwanzaa, the weeklong African heritage festivities in December.

The White House said Trump will also have a statement on Kwanzaa, which the president misspelled in his tweet.

At the official lighting of the National Christmas Tree this year, Trump offered an overtly religious message, noting that “for Christians, this is a holy season.” He added that the “Christmas story begins 2000 years ago with a mother, a father, their baby son, and the most extraordinary gift of all, the gift of God’s love for all of humanity.”

But his predecessor also made remarks grounded in Christian traditions. At his final tree lighting, Obama opened with “Merry Christmas,” and spoke about this being a time to “celebrate the birth of our Savior, as we retell the story of weary travelers, a star, shepherds, Magi.” He went on to discuss the message of the holiday, saying that it “grounds not just my family’s Christian faith but that of Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, non-believers— Americans of all backgrounds.”

Asked if the White House thought the previous administration did not acknowledge Christmas, first lady Melania Trump’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said, “We are focused on our administration.”

Trump’s emphasis on Christmas has been welcomed by evangelical Christians who see it as evidence of his commitment to religious liberty.

Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, said Trump “has talked about it more frequently and with more intensity.”

Conservative angst over a perceived shift away from “Merry Christmas” has long percolated. Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly talked about the “war on Christmas” on his show for years, highlighting businesses that opted to say “Happy Holidays.”

“Among the conservative Christians, they really do feel embattled,” said Mark Alan Smith, a political science professor at the University of Washington. “They have a sense of ‘we’re being persecuted.’ This Merry Christmas thing is part of it.”

Jeffress, who attended holiday events at the White House this year, said Trump’s Christmas comments were one of many moves supported by evangelical Christians, who have cheered as Trump appointed conservative judges, sought to weaken rules governing political activity by religious groups that received tax exemptions, and declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

“I believe a lot of Christians see his willingness to say Merry Christmas as the proxy for religious liberty,” Jeffress said.

But critics say Trump is using Christmas as a cudgel in cultural warfare.

“This is like kneeling during the national anthem,” said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Cassino, who has polled and written on the issue, said there’s no real downside for Trump in keeping up the Christmas talk.

“People who believe it is important feel much more strongly than people who feel you should say Happy Holidays,” Cassino said. “The people who are opposed feel much less strongly.”

Still, Trump’s efforts became a punch line on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” recently as Alec Baldwin portrayed a festive Trump wishing people a “Merry Christmas.”

He added: “You can finally say that again, because the war on Christmas is over. It will soon be replaced by the war on North Korea.”

]]>Trump supporters greet tax law with shrugs and measured hopehttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/23/trump-supporters-greet-tax-law-shrugs-measured-hope/
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 22:49:24 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29257WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Ask someone like Sam Banks about the tax plan President Donald Trump signed into law Friday, and you hear something other than the effusive joy Republicans in Congress put on display this week. The $1.5 trillion plan cuts taxes broadly while bestowing its richest benefits on companies and wealthy individuals. […]

]]>WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Ask someone like Sam Banks about the tax plan President Donald Trump signed into law Friday, and you hear something other than the effusive joy Republicans in Congress put on display this week.

The $1.5 trillion plan cuts taxes broadly while bestowing its richest benefits on companies and wealthy individuals. It is the first major legislative achievement for a president who rode to the White House with the full-throated backing of people like Banks who felt America’s economic policies needed a drastic overhaul.

Yet Banks, a 50-year-old farmer in sparsely populated southwestern Iowa, regards the tax plan with a blend of indifference and uncertainty tinged with hope.

“They had to do something, though it took them long enough,” Banks said of the president and the Congress his party fully controls. “It’s going to help the companies. It’s got to help me a little, I suppose.”

In pockets of the country where Trump scored big with voters last year, the response to the tax overhaul is mainly a muted one. You’ll get a few blank stares, some confusion and a bit of hedged optimism. What you won’t hear is excitement.

Nearly all taxpayers will receive an initial tax cut. But an analysis by the Tax Policy Center shows that the gains favor the wealthy. For households earning between $48,600 and $86,100, the average tax cut in 2018 will be $930. But the top 1 percent of earners — with incomes above $732,800— will enjoy an average tax cut next year exceeding $50,000.

And companies will benefit from having their top marginal tax rate slashed to 21 percent from 35 percent — a permanent reduction unlike the tax cuts for individuals and families that expire after 2025.

“This is not a bill written with the core Obama-Trump voters in mind,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. “In the short term they get a little but not a lot.”

One thinking behind the corporate tax cuts is that they will turbo-charge business activity and that ordinary Americans will, in time, receive benefits in the form of better jobs and higher wages. Most mainstream economists, though, have expressed skepticism that workers will benefit much from lower corporate taxes.

“This is something I’m very proud of,” Trump said Friday at an informal bill signing ceremony in the Oval Office. “Great for our country, great for the American people.”

What taxpayers will receive from the tax plan depends on their personal situations. Business people like Justin Dopierala appear most likely to benefit. Dopierala, 33, who runs an investment business out of Germantown, Wisconsin, expects the changes to reduce taxes substantially on both his corporate and personal income.

“I’m sure my wife and children would love to take more family vacations,” he said.

Banks, the Iowa farmer, isn’t expecting much of a windfall. But he sees a silver lining in the doubling of the threshold for the estate tax — something of interest to family farmers. A married couple will now be able to pass an estate worth up to $22 million to heirs tax free, up from $11 million.

In Beaumont, Texas, Chip Martel, a general contractor, says the tax changes will save his small business a substantial sum and perhaps enable him to expand his workforce of nine. He rejects the complaints of Democrats and other critics that the tax overhaul was assembled hastily, without any hearings but with heavy input from lobbyists.

“I believe we’re in the process of making America great,” Martel said, echoing Trump’s campaign slogan. “We’re changing a lot of the policies that were done with Obama, and I’m not really concerned about how it was done and finding out what’s in the bill after it was passed.”

Rich George, a farmer outside Detroit who boards horses, expressed hope that the tax plan’s provisions for the wealthy will ultimately help him because they will benefit his upper-income clients. He dismisses studies that show the tax plan will swell federal deficits by more than $1 trillion over a decade, even after accounting for any additional economic growth the tax cuts help produce.

“When they talk about, ‘This is going to add trillions of dollars to the deficit,’ I know it’s not going to happen,” George said. “You’re going to give people more money. They’re going to do more business. There’s going to be more people employed. There’s going to be more commerce. Manufacturing is going to go up.”

Some Trump supporters in Iowa said that for now at least, they were choosing to focus on the bright side.

“They needed to get a legislative win,” Heather Kruse, a 34-year-old physician in an affluent Des Moines suburb, said of Republicans.

She acknowledged that the tax plan’s passage was “hastily done.”

Like many voters, Kruse said she didn’t know most of the details and was disappointed by the reports that it won’t likely help the middle class much. But Kruse said she was cautiously hopeful that the benefits of lower taxes for companies would resonate beyond corporate America.

“If that’s true that it makes us more competitive in the global market, I can see that being a positive thing,” she said,

Then there is 88-year-old Marilyn Vanderlinden, a Trump voter who sounded appalled by the tax plan.

“This just means the rich are getting richer,” said Vanderlinden, a retired nurse, who lives in the small town of Centreville on the Missouri border.

In her county, Trump won 65 percent of the vote, which included the backing of her and her son and grandson, who raise cattle. Vanderlinden said she doubts the benefits of the tax plan will reach Centreville, whose median income is only about half the state’s average.

“I voted for Trump, but I wish I could take it back,” she said. “He doesn’t listen.”

]]>ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — The top leadership of the Miss America Organization, implicated in an email scandal that targeted past pageant winners for abuse based on their appearance, intellect and sex lives, resigned on Saturday, with the outgoing president apologizing to a winner whose weight he ridiculed.

The president, Josh Randle, told The Associated Press his comment responding to an email to his private account about the physical appearance of 2013 winner Mallory Hagan came months before he started working for the Miss America Organization in 2015. But he said it was wrong.

“I apologize to Mallory for my lapse in judgment,” Randle said on Saturday. “It does not reflect my values or the values I worked to promote at the Miss America Organization. Although this terrible situation was not caused or driven by me, in light of recent events and new developments, I am no longer willing to continue in my capacity as president and earlier today offered my resignation to the MAO Board of Directors.”

Randle said his resignation was voluntary and had not been requested by the board of Miss America, which is based in Atlantic City.

Hagan did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the resignations. But on her Facebook page, she posted a message asking anyone who was warned away from her to come forward and send her a direct message, in what might be a precursor to legal action against the Miss America Organization or its former officers regarding her post-Miss America work as a pageant interview coach.

“If you have ever been told to not work with me, communicate with me, hire me, etc. Will you send me a DM?” she wrote.

Randle was one of three top Miss America officials to resign Saturday over the scandal, which began Thursday when the Huffington Post published leaked emails showing pageant officials ridiculing past Miss Americas, including crass and sometimes vulgar comments about them.

The emails included one that used a vulgar term for female genitalia to refer to past Miss America winners, one that wished that a particular former Miss America had died and others that speculated about how many sex partners Hagan has had.

Randle noted that the worst communications were exchanged in 2013 and 2014, years before he joined the Miss America Organization, and said the article’s implication of “complicit participation on my part in a years long array of inappropriate email communication” is untrue.

CEO Sam Haskell and Chairman Lynn Weidner also resigned on Saturday. Haskell’s resignation is effective immediately, while Randle and Weidner will remain for a few weeks to help with a leadership transition. Dan Meyers, who had been vice chairman of the board, was named interim chairman.

The organization announced the resignations a day after dozens of former Miss Americas, including Hagan, signed a petition calling on the group’s leadership to step down because of the emails.

The emails already cost the pageant its television production partner and raised questions about the future of the nationally televised broadcast from Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall the week after Labor Day each year. Dick Clark Productions told the AP on Thursday that it cut ties with the Miss America Organization over the emails, calling them “appalling.”

Also on Saturday, one of the main recipients of fundraising from the Miss America Organization said it was reviewing its association with Miss America. The Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals said it was “conducting an immediate review of the situation and will take appropriate actions.”

And New Jersey officials are reviewing their Miss America Organization contract, in which the state still owes $4 million toward the cost of next year’s pageant.

]]>Mosul’s morgue men endured worst of Islamic State butcheryhttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/23/mosuls-morgue-men-endured-worst-islamic-state-butchery/
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 22:41:43 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29253MOSUL, Iraq — The young man ended up on the morgue’s examining table in two parts. He had been seized for selling cigarettes, a crime usually punished by flogging by the Islamic State group extremists who had occupied Mosul. But while he was being whipped, he shouted a curse insulting religion. On the spot, they […]

]]>MOSUL, Iraq — The young man ended up on the morgue’s examining table in two parts.

He had been seized for selling cigarettes, a crime usually punished by flogging by the Islamic State group extremists who had occupied Mosul. But while he was being whipped, he shouted a curse insulting religion. On the spot, they cut off his head for blasphemy.

Sameh al-Azzawi, the 35-year-old medical assistant examining him, was sick of seeing Mosul’s youth butchered for the slightest reason. The man was a newlywed. His family was waiting outside; it was one of the occasional times when the fanatics allowed the return of someone killed by the group. So al-Azzawi violated the rules: He picked out some thick thread and quickly sewed the man’s head back on, then zipped him up in the body bag. He could sew a head back on a body in four minutes.

The morgue in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was where atrocity met bureaucracy, the processing point for the machine of butchery that the Islamic State group created across its territory in Iraq and Syria. Every day, the doctors and staff witnessed the worst of what the militants were capable of inflicting on a human being, constantly fearing they could be next.

Yet the morgue men of Mosul found ways large and small to defy their captors by honoring the dead as best they could.

“Our profession as doctors is all about humanity,” said the morgue’s senior examiner, Modhar al-Omari. “They were doing the exact opposite.”

The staff sometimes faced up to 60 or even 100 corpses a day. As pickup trucks laden with bodies did three-point turns to back through the morgue’s gates, hands, legs or heads fell off onto the ground.

Some were the mangled bodies of civilians and IS fighters killed in bombardment by the U.S-led coalition or fighting with Iraqi troops. Others bore the marks of IS’ brutal enforcement of its radical version of Islamic law. A broken skull on a man with internal bleeding could mean he was thrown from a rooftop, the punishment for those suspected of being gay. A woman with a split skull from a blunt force was likely stoned to death, the sentence for accused adulterers. Then there were punishments for spying or blasphemy: a gunshot wound through the head or decapitation.

Convinced its “caliphate” was here to stay, the Islamic State group was keen on keeping records like a government. As they put together death certificates, the examiners quietly documented IS atrocities . They surreptitiously put an Arabic letter alif to mark a member of the group, and an M, the first letter in the Arabic word for “executed,” for the group’s victims.

One Excel sheet shows more than 1,200 people shot in the head, a likely sign of IS “executions,” between June 2014 when IS took over Mosul and January 2017, when Iraqi forces were fighting to take the city back — an average of 11 a week. The list has 12 women marked as “stoned to death.” It also lists 95 people who were beheaded and 50 men and boys who died from a “fall from a height,” likely hurled from rooftops.

The staff operated under close scrutiny by IS officials and threat of punishment if they broke the rules or tried to leave. Among those rules: The bodies of those “executed under religious law” could not be returned to their families, except in cases where an IS commander allowed it. Instead, they were dumped in mass graves. Thousands more went directly into mass graves without ever coming to the morgue ad IS brought at least 1,000 bodies to the morgue that they did not allow the staff to examine, so they have no idea who they were and did not record them.

Al-Azzawi managed to sew the heads back on about 10 bodies, he estimates. It had to be quick. He did it after midnight in the washing area, which IS fighters tended to stay out of because it was the worst smelling part of the morgue.

He stopped when one militant saw a body with the head restored. “We cut it and you put it back?” the fighter shouted. He

A pickup truck dumped nearly a dozen bodies onto the pavement of the morgue courtyard, the latest delivery. “Get up!” an IS fighter screamed at the staff, summoning them to begin their daily task of sorting through the dead.

As the medical assistants went to work, one of them stopped short in surprise: Among the bodies, a young man in a soccer jersey and training pants who had been thrown off a rooftop was breathing.

“He’s still alive!” the assistant shouted instinctively.

He hardly had time to realize his mistake. The IS fighter opened fire with his automatic rifle, spraying the bodies. Bullets thumped into the already dead and finished off the young man.

“It’s a lot of pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure,” said Raid Jassim, the chief medical assistant. “I always expected them to come at any moment and kill or behead us.”

In 2005, Jassim was overjoyed to get a government posting at Mosul’s Forensic Department, the morgue. The pay was several times more than what he’d earn in a government hospital. He was a graduate of a medical institute, a two-year diploma after high school, and had gone on to serve as an army nurse. At the morgue, he carried out examinations of bodies under supervision of doctors like al-Omari.

But no training prepared him for what he saw under the killers ruling his city.

A few months after IS took over, a militant brought in the body of a Yazidi woman, one of thousands from the religious minority group taken as sex slaves. She had hanged herself after being repeatedly gang-raped.

Jassim, 48, watched in horror and disgust as the militant spoke to the body. “Why did you kill yourself? I told you I am not selling you to the commander. I told you I was going to marry you,” the fighter pleaded.

One evening, fighters drove up with two men, alive, in the trunk of their car. They pulled them into the morgue courtyard and — in front of staffers too terrified to say a word — they shot one in the head and decapitated the other.

“This is a message to anyone who betrays the Caliphate,” one fighter yelled. The examiners suspected the two were IS members who had turned against the group. But they didn’t know why the fighters brought them to the morgue to kill. Was it a message for the staff somehow?

“In these occasions, we don’t open our mouths. We just stay silent,” Jassim said.

The morgue was located in the al-Shifaa medical complex, a large compound in the western half of Mosul that included the city’s main hospital, Jomhouriya, and other facilities. It was the primary medical facility for the militants, so fighters were brought from elsewhere in Iraq and even Syria for treatment. The office of the IS health minister was located there. That meant the staff was under the militants’ eyes all the time.

Jassim is a chain smoker and smoking was a crime. He hid his pack under his belt, covering up the smell with a spray of musk. Still, he was caught and punished with 30 lashes.

Another time he was severely beaten with a rifle butt in the office of IS’s deputy health minister, where he was taken after he refused a fighter’s demand that he forge a death certificate. Jassim’s two young sons, outside the office, heard their father’s screams.

But in a few cases, he and other staffers smuggled the dead to their families before they vanished into mass graves. They did it in secret, at night, cutting electricity to shut off the morgue’s security cameras as they hustled the bodies into their cars.

In one case, Jassim inspected the body of a woman who had been killed for allegedly feeding information to the Iraqi military.

Unexploded mortar shells are gathered on a street in the main hospital complex area in Mosul. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

In February 2016, she had posted on her Facebook page, “Snow is falling.” That seemed suspiciously like code to the Islamic State group, and she was arrested. The judge allowed her husband and children to meet with her for an hour before she was taken out to a public square and shot to death.

After that excruciating torment, the family should at least to be able to bury her, Jassim thought.

He met the businessmen at night in a parking garage, switching off the headlights of their cars off for fear of airstrikes. “You brought her?” the businessman asked. “Yes,” Jassim replied. The man broke into tears and hugged him in gratitude. Jassim then opened his car’s trunk so they could pull out his wife’s corpse.

BURYING THE TRAUMA

Al-Azzawi recounts how tragedy after tragedy broke him down.

One day, he was going through the latest body bags when he saw a name he recognized pinned to a corpse. It was his cousin. The face was unrecognizable; he had been shot in the head for allegedly spying.

“I couldn’t believe it, I was reading the piece of paper over and over,” he said.

Months later, al-Azzawi tried to escape Mosul with a smuggler’s help. He and dozen others hid under boxes of potato chips in a truck but were caught near the Syrian border. He spent 10 days in detention, released only after he signed a pledge never to flee again on pain of death.

Iraqi troops liberated western Mosul in the summer of 2017, and much of the medical complex where the morgue is located was bombed into ruins during the fighting that drove out the militants.

A stench now pervades the morgue from bodies that were in the refrigerators and are now buried in the rubble. The metal desks in the morgue offices have IS stickers on the drawers. Written on a wall is one of the slogans of the group, “Baqiya” — Arabic for “We will remain.” Next to it, someone has scrawled an insult, “Son of dog.”

Freed, the morgue men struggle with what they endured. Jassim can’t sleep without popping multiple valiums. His 13-year-old son — fearing for his father — won’t sleep apart from him. Some staffers have disappeared since liberation, simply not showing back up to work.

Al-Omari, the chief examiner, has been numbed by the helplessness he felt in the face of the fanatics’ dictates and butchery.

The 43-year-old veteran doctor and surgeon was well known among his staff for his calm. He was used to wearing suits, but under IS he was forced to wear the “Islamic” garb of shortened pants and a long beard that the group said was the style of the Prophet Muhammad.

]]>Myanmar to grant families access to two Reuters journalists after remand period expireshttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/23/myanmar-grant-families-access-two-reuters-journalists-remand-period-expires/
Sat, 23 Dec 2017 21:48:31 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29249YANGON – Two Reuters journalists detained in Myanmar will be allowed to meet their families once their first 14-day period of remand expires, according to local media reports. Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been in detention for 11 days in an undisclosed location and have had no access to their families, lawyers […]

]]>YANGON – Two Reuters journalists detained in Myanmar will be allowed to meet their families once their first 14-day period of remand expires, according to local media reports.

Reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been in detention for 11 days in an undisclosed location and have had no access to their families, lawyers or colleagues.

They were arrested after being invited to meet police officials over dinner on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon on Dec. 12. The authorities are investigating whether they violated the country’s colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which has a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

“After the first remand (expires), they will be able to meet their families. They will be sent to the court for testimonies,” Tin Myint, permanent secretary of Ministry of Home Affairs, was quoted as saying by Radio Free Asia.

In Myanmar, those remanded must be brought to court within 14 days. But it’s not immediately clear when the pair was first remanded and whether the authorities will seek court approval to remand them for a second 14-day period.

The Home Affairs Ministry did not responded to several requests for comments.Reuters journalist Wa Lone, who was arrested in Myanmar, is seen in this July 29, 2014 photo.

Family members of the two journalists say they have not received any official communication about the question of remand or the investigation, and neither has Reuters.

Tin Myint said the case against the two Reuters reporters will be “transparent” and the authorities will follow the rule of law, according to Daily Eleven newspaper.

File photo of Reuters journalist Kyaw Soe Oo, who was arrested in Myanmar, is seen in this January 31, 2017 photo.

Major governments, including the United States, Britain and Canada, leading international political figures and top United Nations officials are among those who have demanded the release of the Reuters reporters.

The two journalists had worked on Reuters coverage of a crisis in the western state of Rakhine, where an estimated 655,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from a fierce military crackdown on militants.

A spokesman for Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi this week told Reuters that the police had almost completed their investigation and the two reporters will be treated in line with the law.

The Ministry of Information said last week that Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, had “illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media”.

]]>Money hungry lawyer of Nashville -Michael Hoskinshttp://letthetruthout.com/2017/12/09/tillerson-says-us-direct-channels-talk-north-korea/
Sat, 09 Dec 2017 23:15:09 +0000http://letthetruthout.com/?p=29197Lawyers are representative of clients or a neutral third party, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice. There are over twenty seven thousand lawyers in Tennessee where population is about six million and number of families about 2 million. Considering these numbers there are not […]

Lawyers are representative of clients or a neutral third party, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.

There are over twenty seven thousand lawyers in Tennessee where population is about six million and number of families about 2 million. Considering these numbers there are not many jobs available for lawyers in Tennessee. It means each lawyer on equal base of distribution should have about 50 to 60 clients a year. But this is based on equal distribution of cases requiring a lawyer which is not the case at all. So, how would a lawyer could survive if not working for a law firm.

Finding a client is hard in such tight market therefore there are lawyers who do not perform well, lack enough knowledge of the law or understanding the court and residing judge.

One of those lawyers is Michael Hoskins a Nashvillian lawyer. A lawyer that loves to join the elites but lacks manners and etiquette, a lawyer that lacks knowledge of law and the courtrooms but is ego reaches farthest planet in our galaxy.

Michale Hoskins is one of those lawyers whose invoices are also extremely padded and charges for the work he has not done or creates work that is not needed or required by the court in defense of his client.

Michael Hoskins is a struggling lawyer but has found a solution that is unethical but he continues to do it. Simply, he is charging the client for what is not needed or exaggerates the number of hours he worked on the case. Michale Hoskins also is one of those lucky lawyers who has found the crystal ball enabling him to see the ruling of judges in advance.

Michael Hoskins is a type of lawyer that would charge you a retainer of 3000 dollars for a simple moving traffic violation. And that is just the beginning.

Michael Hoskins is a type of lawyer that would charge you for the time he did not spend on your case twice and if he could possibly more. For example, he would prepare the case in court and charges you for that and time spent in court plus additional time that he did not spend on the case.

He is a lawyer who lacks code of ethics, and professionalism. If you are looking for a crock you could hire him but make sure you do not give him a blank credit card.